The Internet site “del.icio.us” (pronounced and referred to as “delicious” below) is essentially a collection of bookmarks to users' favorite Internet-accessible resources (e.g., web pages, files, images, movies, documents, etc.). Using “delicious,” users can maintain bookmarks to their favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more. Users can access the bookmarks from any Internet-connected computer. Users can use “delicious” to share their favorite bookmarks with friends, family, coworkers, and the “delicious” community. Users can use “delicious” to discover new things. Every bookmark to which “delicious” refers is someone's favorite, and that someone has already done the work of finding the resource to which that bookmark refers. “Delicious” is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more.
“Delicious” is a social bookmarking Internet site. “Bookmarks” are references to Internet-accessible resources. Bookmarks are often implemented as links. Bookmarks can be used to instruct an Internet browser application to access (request, receive, and store or present) resources to which those bookmarks refer. Users primarily use “delicious” to store their bookmarks online rather than in a browser application. Because “delicious” allows users to store their bookmarks online, “delicious” allows users to access their collections of bookmarks from any computer. The online-oriented nature of “delicious” also allows users to add bookmarks to their collections from any computer. Users of “delicious” can use tags (discussed below) to organize and remember (save) their bookmarks.
Users also can use “delicious” to see the interesting bookmarks of their friends and other people, and to share bookmarks with those friends and other people in return. Users can browse and search “delicious” to discover useful bookmarks that others have saved. Browsing and searching bookmarks is made easy with tags.
As used herein, “tags” are verbal descriptors that users can assign to and associate with things—in the case of “delicious,” the things to which the tags are assigns are bookmarks. Each tag comprises one or more user-chosen words and/or symbols. Users can assign as many different tags to a bookmark as they like. Users can rename and delete tags as they choose. Because tags are user-chosen, users can assign, to bookmarks of their choice, tags that are indicative of the subjective meaning that those users ascribe to the resources to which those bookmarks refer. Because the same resources might have different subjective meanings to different users, different users might assign different tags to the same resource. For many users, tagging bookmarks with tags of their own choosing is much easier and more flexible than fitting bookmarks into rigid categories or folders preconceived by others.
Although “delicious” is a very useful and popular system for sharing bookmarks, currently, “delicious” can only be used to tag bookmarks.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.